Windows at 1000 Frames Per Second: The Raymond Chen Interview

Windows Pinball, IBM, debugging, the confidential coffee maker, losing your car keys, and more: Dave interviews Raymond Chen, a 30-year developer on Windows at Microsoft. For my book on Asperger's/ASD, please check out: https://amzn.to/3GcdeUM For Raymond's book The Old New Thing: https://amzn.to/40Qhvad 3D Pinball animation by Jack Bertram:    / @jackbertram   My other channel, join now so you're there for episode 01 of my AudioBook!    / @davepl   Discord Chat w/ Myself and Subscribers:   / discord   Primary Equipment (Amazon Affiliate Links): Camera: Sony FX-3 - https://amzn.to/3w31C0Z Camera Lens: 50mm F1.4 Art DG HSM - https://amzn.to/3kEnYk4 Microphone: Electro-Voice RE 320 - https://amzn.to/37gL65g Teleprompter: Glide Gear TMP 100 - https://amzn.to/3MN2nlA Teleprompter Monitor: https://amzn.to/3YWCSFC SD Cards: Sony TOUGH - https://amzn.to/38QZGR9 Aputure 300d II Light: https://amzn.to/46axuRZ CHAPTERS 00:00:00 Intro 00:01:39 The "special edition" of Windows 95 00:02:07 The absence of 64-bit Pinball in Windows 00:03:15 The 64-bit Windows project initially targeted Itanium processors 00:04:46 During the 64-bit Windows project, resolving Pinball's collision detection problem 00:06:00 Pinball's removal from the 64-bit Windows 00:07:23 The fix for Pinball might have involved a floating point rounding issue 00:08:47 Testing for Pinball's collision detection problem 00:11:05 Raymond once received a death threat 00:12:30 Raymond joined Microsoft after applying for graduate school 00:16:07 Raymond's consistent jacket and tie attire 00:18:52 Raymond leverages his extensive network at Microsoft 00:19:31 The term "hive" in the Windows registry 00:21:06 Users sometimes tend to avoid answering dialogues they find confusing or unnecessary 00:23:06 Windows 95 faced challenges with its time zone map 00:30:35 Taskbar grouping 00:34:29 Designing intuitive vending machine interfaces 00:36:49 Windows team had mascots like "Bear," "Bunny," and "Piglet," 00:42:14 The "USB Cart of Death" was a cart loaded with multiple USB devices used for testing USB functionality 00:46:11 Porting from 32-bit to 64-bit Windows 00:50:31 Dave Cutler 00:52:06 Bill Gates 00:53:01 Windows Power Toys 00:56:12 Tweaking Windows with 'Tweak UI' 00:59:37 Microsoft's policy shift against offering unsupported downloads 01:03:49 The innovative approach to Windows 95 compatibility testing 01:07:32 A dive into game compatibility 01:10:16 Race conditions in multitasking OSs 01:12:21 Raymond Chen fixed Windows Pinball's CPU usage issue 01:14:31 The time travel debugger 01:18:23 Color-coding files (blue for compressed, green for encrypted 01:20:49 Usability studies observing users 01:23:19 Windows 286 and 386 01:25:07 Long file names stored in Unicode 01:28:33 Misaligned data in processors like RISC led to significant performance issues 01:31:52 Splitting a PC into two workstations 01:32:44 Game developers thanked Raymond Chen for getting their games to work on Windows 95 01:34:59 Raymond Chen had an unused VIP ticket to the Windows 95 launch but gave it away; 01:36:08 Colleagues on the Windows NT printing team crafted forgeries of Windows 95 launch tickets 01:38:27 Microsoft employees brought a coffee maker to IBM's office 01:43:17 Steve Ballmer left his rental car at an IBM parking lot 01:45:23 Dave once lost his rental car keys on the beach 01:46:30 Raymond's early hacking and reverse engineering skills 01:51:49 Raymond's transition from mathematics to software engineering 01:52:48 Raymond's father was a mechanical engineering professor 01:56:02 Raymond Chen talks about decluttering his cables 01:56:57 Chen maintains a six-month content buffer for his blog 01:58:18 Windows 95 debugging involved handling programs that allocated excessive memory 02:00:21 Compatibility challenges for Win95 included issues with DOS extenders 02:03:04 Debugging strategy involved trapping and correcting code that disabled interrupts